Dwight Signs Off On Eminent Domain

The city’s Redevelopment Agency won hard-earned community support on Tuesday night for its bid to use eminent domain to hold slumlords accountable in the Dwight neighborhood.

City officials offered one final concession to the neighborhood: The city won’t follow through with seizing a specific rundown property if the community vetoes the idea.

Such was the outcome of the latest meeting of the Dwight Community Management Team (DCMT) on Tuesday night, when over 30 neighbors gathered in the cafeteria of the Amistad Academy Middle School on Edgewood Avenue to discuss new developments in the neighborhood. On the table was whether to approve a Chapel/Dwight/Whalley Redevelopment and Renewal Plan proposed by the city’s Redevelopment Agency. The agency has tried for months to win the team’s approval, stop one in a multi-step process of making the plan a realty.

Led by chair Florita Gillespie, the DCMT Tuesday night finally voted to write a letter in support of the Redevelopment Agency’s proposed plan, which promises more active government involvement in the area bounded by Whalley Avenue, York Street, Frontage Street, and Ella T. Grasso Boulevard.

For the past year, Redevelopment Agency commissioners have been making their pitch to the DCMT as to why the community should support the resurrection of an urban renewal tool that would allow the city to seize ownership of neglected, privately-owned buildings at fair-market value and then redevelop those properties to be in line with the density, character, and overall condition of the surrounding neighborhood.

Click here for a previous story on the city’s new eminent domain pitch, and here for a story on Redevelopment Agency commissioner (and Dwight neighbor) Joel Schiavone’s prior pitch to the DCMT on this issue.

While the city currently has the right to exercise eminent domain for the sake of constructing public projects (e.g. schools, firehouses, new roads), state statute requires that the city pass a publicly-approved redevelopment plan before it can engage in eminent domain for the sake of economic development.

That is, the city already has the authority to buy private property for public use. But it needs to adopt into law a redevelopment plan before it can buy private property for private use.

Over the past year, DCMT members have expressed wariness over the Redevelopment Agency’s proposed reintroduction of a municipal tool that many associate with the mid-century demolition and abandonment of working class neighborhoods for the sake of suburb-oriented highway development.

McGrath: This Ain’t The ​‘60s

On Tuesday night, Redevelopment Agency chair Brian McGrath assured neighbors that the city is not at all interested in buying and leveling large swaths of real estate for the sake of rebuilding a neighborhood en masse.

Instead, it seeks to use eminent domain as a precision weapon for pressuring and punishing negligent landlords who profit off of dilapidated properties at the neighborhood’s, and the city’s, expense, he said.

“The plan that we’re doing now is nothing like it was in the old days, where [the city] used to name entire neighborhoods for condemnation and then not buy [the demolished properties],” McGrath told the DCMT.

“All our plan says is that, if you’re within this district, you have to follow the city’s zoning ordinance. We’re saying that all the properties have to follow the city housing codes and building codes.”

McGrath, a retired city development and transit official, said that the city perpetually struggles with landlords who refuse to fix up their properties, profit off them until they collapse, abandon them to tax foreclosure, and then leave them for demolition at the city’s expense. He said that the Livable City Initiative (LCI), the city’s anti-blight agency, can issue fines to slumlords all it wants, but that the city currently lacks any formidable resource for dealing with negligent property owners who refuse to change their ways.

“The city got a little soft in the last 15 – 20 years and hasn’t been able to deal with these problems,” McGrath said, referring to how the city has let lapse all its previously-adopted redevelopment plans. Each plan lasts for 10 years before it has to be renewed.

With a new redevelopment plan’s affordances for eminent domain, McGrath argued, the city would be able to force a slumlord to sell his property to the city, and then the city could work with a new developer to restore or rebuild the property.

“How do you decide which buildings you’re going to target?” asked Kate Walton, a Dwight resident and the director of the Interfaith Volunteer Care Givers of Greater New Haven.

“The public decides,” McGrath replied. ​“We don’t decide. If a building becomes burned out, blighted, and sits there for too long and the owners are not cooperative, that’s how you decide. You come to the city and say, enough’s enough.”

According to McGrath’s presentation and to a draft of the redevelopment plan that he and city economic development officer Carlos Eyzaguirre passed around during the meeting, the city would solicit the opinion of the DCMT, and would require the approval of the Whalley Special Services District (WSSD), the Chapel Special Services District (CSSD, which McGrath runs), and the Greater Dwight Development Corporation (GDDC) before it proceeds with the acquisition and redevelopment of any properties within the prescribed area.

If the WSSD, CSSD, or GDDC disapprove of an eminent domain project within their area of coverage, then the city would have to desist. If those organizations consent to the eminent domain project but the Board of Alders rejects it at a subsequent, required public hearing, then the city would have to desist.

McGrath stressed again and again that this redevelopment plan is not focused on widespread demolition, but on targeted preservation of a neighborhood.

“This is the first renewal plan that specifically says that all priority will go to renovation and protecting historic buildings,” he said. ​“And that demolition will be the last resort in a project.”

After his presentation, management team chair Gillespie opened the floor for questions — but also made clear that the DCMT had had enough time over the past year to consider this plan, and that the team would be writing a letter of support for McGrath and the Redevelopment Plan.

“Now Brian has been here twice, and it’s really time for us to move on,” she said. ​“Because we want our neighborhood to thrive. There are properties that are not being upkept properly, and it makes our property values as homeowners go down. We’re not going to take that anymore, and this is why the management team will be sending a letter to Brian so that they can move forward.”

McGrath said that he had already received letters of support from the WSSD, CSSD, and GDDC, and that the formal encouragement of the DCMT would go long way in bolstering the legitimacy of this proposal when he and the Redevelopment Agency hold a formal public hearing on it sometime in the near future. McGrath noted that, before the plan can be adopted as law, it must undergo a public hearing, and then receive approval from the Board of Alders, the City Plan Commission, and likely the Board of Zoning Appeals too.

After the meeting, city Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson explained that the volunteer advisory Redevelopment Agency, which falls under his department, has to proceed with such caution and jump through so many different approvals and checks and balances because redevelopment plans have historically sometimes resulted in the destruction rather than the preservation of New Haven neighborhoods.

“Like any tool, it can be misused,” he said. ​“Redevelopment got a reputation for being overused. But if redevelopment is used surgically, it can add more value to existing properties. And it says to properties owners that we need you to be good neighbors.”

McGrath and Eyzaguirre did not say when a final version of the Redevelopment Plan will be finished. However, when it is, the Redevelopment Agency plans to hold a public hearing on it downtown before it is submitted to the Board of Alders for review.